I was gonna let it drop because you were being reasonable, but every figure I've seen that looks right for sustainable populations says you're off by about an order of magnitude. 10 billion instead of 1 billion. So uh. Sources?
I just got off of the end of the semester and drive back home, so you'll forgive me if I'm not digging through journals for peer-review quality and play this a bit more typical internet quality.
Firstly, I will establish the past viability of one billion. The
last time we had that many people in the world was 1804, but rates of population growth before then had not started the S-curve pattern strongly, so we spent about 300 years going from 500 million to 1 billion (incidentally, these periods become exponentially shorter, and though they are now slowing the gross population is still the real problem). At this time we had some inkling of the problems to come with some of the larger cities, but the
pattern of the Holocene extinction hadn't gotten started. The problems of this population are something our vaunted technological advancement actually can solve, since they were mostly centered around things like waste disposal we have somewhat down. As such, I don't think there's a substantial enough risk to this population point to dismiss it as too high. This is not true for higher figures.
Now, the present of 7.3 billion. Our actions have brought about substantial harm already. Our industrial activities
have already fucked the ocean pretty badly by lowering the collective pH, which more or less kills everything. Even the things that can resist acidity changes are dependent upon things that cannot. This
alone justifies population reduction. All life is ultimately dependent upon the connections laid down in the oceans, and we're fucking up bad if we think we can last without. Even this presumes the
Clathrate gun is just chasing ghosts, and it isn't.
While you're between paragraphs, here's some backing of the obscene ignorance of how we collectively treat this issue. We're multiple levels of concern below rational ones.
We're gonna need 80% more electricity and 55% more water than we have now, by the way. You aren't going to magic that up. If you throw everything in the pot together and just ignore the CO2 problem you can get near the electricity figure. And if you think the problems aren't going to impact you, think again.
California is in such a state of terminal drought I have no doubt that we will soon just wipe that slate clean and declare it the new metric of normal condition, because it is. And those polar vortexes aren't going to stop either.
But you probably already believe in climate change, so here's the rub.
Even if we all lived relatively poorly, we'd still just be scraping the barrel, and that's if the population never goes up again. There is an inherent inverse relationship between what quality of life we may maintain without exceeding terminal replacement and the total population of the world. All of the numbers I have brought up over this entire thing can only intensify in a world where we don't stop reproducing so damn much.
As for "10 billion", how absolutely convenient for us that the number of people who will be in the world at current growth rates come 2100 is supposedly the number we can handle, so wonderfully just outside your expected lifespan just in case. That's a point set with some intent and as far as I've seen, never meaningfully backed.
Here's someone you probably respect more than me and who knows his shit's take on it.Telling me that I don't want to hear something that I'm already perfectly aware of isn't going to be a very effective way of convincing me that we need to start sterilizing people against their will.
It's more that society at large does not want to hear it. We collectively block out the obvious truth that there are too many people on this planet, even among otherwise zealous environmentalists, because this upsets the heart of conventional and traditional forces that are still the most powerful elements of most societies. Even things like postmodern culture and accepting homosexuality are not as utterly odious and repulsive to most people as telling them to stop shitting out children.
And, in all fairness, natalism is practically a part of our DNA. Continually frustrated as I am over it, it is essentially to be expected that people will prefer to latch onto ideas of "new technology will save us", "sustainable practices will save us", "it's just Over There that's the problem",
anything to avoid the final conclusion. Unfortunately, once you read the numbers it becomes clear.
Now, much as I'd truly love just to ignore the desires of ignorant eater-types and dust them with sterilizing drugs, we all know that's both inefficient and very capable of backlash even in the world where we ignore or justify all moral concerns in much the same way you can't just kidnap the children of anti-vaxxers no matter how rational that seems.
Sadly, the need for at least a plurality agreement on not reproducing means it probably won't happen. But it should.